I saw a video recently, of a coach teaching a kid to do a backflip. They were in a gymnastics facility, with padding everywhere. The coach broke the motion down into small pieces, first helping the kid jump higher, then to tuck his knees while jumping, then to roll from a tucked position to his feet… piece by piece, getting all the sections of a backflip down. Then, they started stringing the parts of the backflip together, first with help, then with less help, then unassisted. Here’s a similar 1-minute video, if you’re interested.
It’s a helpful structure, going from a full fluid movement, backwards to its fragmented pieces, then forward into connecting all the pieces once more into a flowing whole. That’s essentially what we’re doing in this course as well. In this page, I’ll show you what a “backflip” looks like. Then in the rest of the course, I’ll break it down to pieces that you can practice and connect. By the end, you’ll be getting more and more fluid with your own movements.
So to start: what is the “backflip” here? What does mythosomatic dream return look like? What does it do?
Let’s first get out of the way a couple things that this practice isn’t. This Isn’t Lucid Dreaming , and it isn’t dream interpretation. Our goals here aren’t to control or tame the dreams, to make them be what we want them to be, or say what we want them to say. Just like Robert Moss says about his own method of Active Dreaming, dream return
…is not to be confused with approaches that purport to "control" or manipulate dreams; it is utterly misguided to seek to put the control freak that is the ego in charge of something immeasurably wiser and deeper than itself.
Our attitude is that the unconscious has something to show us, something to say to us, and that one way it communicates is through our dreams. So in mythosomatic dream return, you train yourself to, while awake, go back into your dreams, to listen more carefully, to speak back from time to time, to take in all of what is being communicated — words, images, body language, mood, atmosphere, intuitions, all of it.
From there, you let these communications sink in; you let them metabolize into your body. Listening well isn’t a matter of toying around with words and symbols until they give you a couple sentences that the mind can understand — it’s a matter of deeply listening, letting yourself be shifted and developed and evolved by, as Herman Hesse put it, “the teaching your blood whispers.”
In mythosomatic dream return, you go back into your dreams and let them unfold through all of you, body, mind, heart, and soul.
That’s it. That’s the backflip. It’s simple, but it’s by no means easy. Most people take at least a few weeks to start getting satisfying results, and longer to get results that feel impossible.
This kind of work is very non-linear — I’ve gone for months before with very little seeming to happen, and then a single session dissolved emotional blocks that had been rock solid my whole life.
I’ve sat down and prepared myself for a long session, clearing my schedule for a couple hours — and then had a rapid release in 5 minutes, with a clear “all done for today” message.
Carl Jung said "The wealth of the soul exists in images,” and one of his followers, James Hillman, spent much of his career delving into the possibilities of the psyche’s imagery.
In our work together here, we explore those possibilities too — not as theoreticians or armchair academics, but as explorers. Mythosomatic dream return is a training voyage, an apprenticeship for learning firsthand the patterns and dynamics of inner imagery, impressions, and somatic activations.